Google backpedals: offers Google Videos to YouTube transfer option

After hearing from users that the migration off of Google Videos was unnecessarily difficult, Google has decided to eliminate the April 29, 2011 deadline. Google Videos users can rest assured that they won't be losing any of their content as the company begins to shut down the service.

Last week, Google sent an email to those who had uploaded content to Google Videos, telling them of two new deadlines. After April 29, 2011 they would no longer be able to watch any more videos. They had until May 13, 2011 to download their videos. Google encouraged them to re-upload their videos to YouTube but didn't offer users an option to transfer their videos to a YouTube account.

That changed this week when Google realized users were not happy with this decision. The company has decided to automatically migrate content from Google Videos to YouTube. For those who want to do so themselves, Google is now offering an Upload Videos to YouTube option on the Google Videos status page. To use this function, you'll need to have a YouTube account associated with your Google Videos account.

Google Videos was launched on January 25, 2005, but Google acquired YouTube for $1.65 billion in October 2006. Google announced on June 13, 2007 that Google Videos search results would begin to include videos discovered by their search crawlers on other hosting services, including YouTube. In May 2009, Google Videos stopped accepting uploads. Although previously uploaded videos were still available, the service remained as a video search function, and now the search giant wants to finish the transformation by (eventually) deleting all remaining videos.

"Last week we sent an email to Google Video users letting them know we would be ending playbacks of Google Videos on April 29 and providing instructions on how to download videos currently hosted on the platform," a Google spokesperson said in a statement. "Since then we've received feedback from you about making the migration off of Google Video easier. We work every day to make sure you have a great user experience and should have done better. Based on your feedback, here's what we're doing to fix things."